would you suppose it’s possible for one to be …
antidisestablishmentarianistical ?
:-s
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And so you should be. 
antidisestablishmentarianists, shirley?
Just to say I’m with Owain here on letters - ‘rh’ is a letter (apart from when it’s not) and I’ll stand for no colonial attempts to say it’s made up of characters, or any such nonsense. 
That has to be one of the least clear emoticons I’ve ever seen. Apart, perhaps, from Louis and his banana.
[If ‘rh’ were made up out of ‘more than one character’ (which it isn’t), then so would ‘i’ and ‘j’ be in English.]
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by the way, antidisestablishmentarianism in Welsh is apparently gwrthddatgysylltiadaeth … disappointingly on the short side in comparison!
how about ‘cyfrwngddarostynedigaeth’ ? 22 (Welsh) letters 
a word from the 15th & 16th centuries meaning “intercession”.
or ‘microsbectroffotometreg’ ? also 22 (Welsh) letters : Microspectrophotometry is the measure of the spectra of microscopic samples using different wavelengths of electromagnetic radiation.
please stop me know - I have work to do!
ok, just one more observation -
Unlikely we’ll ever find anything that comes close to the longest German word -
Kraftfahrzeughaftpflichtversicherung which means “motor-vehicle-liability-insurance”.
I’ll get my coat…
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That may be the antidisestablishmentarianisticalest thing I’ve ever heard.
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Agreed, Rh is definitely a letter. Sorry, my bad using the term “letter” in my original statement! But - on a computer at least - it’s definitely two characters, however you encode it.
(That said, there probably should be Unicode codepoints for the Welsh digraphs. Though it would mean that IMEs would need to be taught the list of exceptions so they could know whether or not to replace R-H with a Rh character as you type. Unless we had keyboards with buttons for the digraphs too… which would be really cool… :))
@owainlurch: Turns out the middle-Welsh LL ligature you mentioned actually does have its own codepoints - U+1EFA for the capital and U+1EFB for the lowercase! (Wikipedia)
I recall asking our GCSE German teacher about that, and she told us the somewhat contrived example of “das Vierwaldstätterseedampfschiffgesellschaftskapitänsmützensternlein” - which I believe is literally “the Lake Lucerne Steam Ship Company’s Captain’s Hat’s Little Star”…
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Since urls can now deal with Cyrillic, they ought to be able to work out perfectly simple and straightforward Welsh 
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They ought to, but whereas Cyrillic has its own full unicode set (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Unicode_characters ), Welsh for some reason does not, other than the accented vowels. The digraphs/ligatures are just not there, which is curious, because there is an enormous collection (e.g. Dz, ij, lj, nj) for other languages. I suspect this situation may have something to do with the fact that there is no Welsh typewriter layout. Is this something for the Welsh Language Commissioner to address? Adding some extra unicode characters can’t be that difficult, I would imagine.
Oops forgot: 
That dictionary is a really useful resource, thanks for linking to that!
Sometimes you can’t tell whether a “ng” is a digraph or not even from where it is in the dictionary ( depending on the surrounding words) but that makes it all clear!
The only other dictionary that I’ve seen to point it out is the pronunciation guides for each word in Heini Gruffudd’s Welsh Learner’s Dictionary, but this is clearer and has More Words.
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The Geiriadur Prifysghol Cymru does a similar thing, I think - http://www.geiriadur.ac.uk/
Look up words like “sarhad” and you’ll see a vertical line appearing between the r and the h.
This is an interesting discussion, and reminds me of reading “Y bardd cwfc” (actually cwsc, with the old fashined “s”, but we always called it Y Bardd Cwffc…) which included the digraphic link in ll, for certain. I can’t remember the other letters, to be honest…
Oh, excellent! I am not sure I like the new format there, where you can’t go through the pdf files online and have to search for words, but that is an improvement! Ta for pointing that out!
On the weird letter thing, they were used well before printing and only by some scribes (spelling and even alphabets having a sort of dialect until printing!).
Reading again what I said above it probably exaggerates the extent to which hey were used (and possibly when! Now I cone to think of it, I have a feeling some of them fell out of use well before printing!)
A “long-tailed” u was pretty widespread instead of “w”, though that is a different thing, but a strange “delta” type thing for “dd” and a character seemingly borrowed from ‘yogh’ for “ch” were less used, if I remember rightly!
Well, off out now, but I’ll see if I can track any manuscripts with them in down when I come back from the pub! Well, Something for me to look forward to!
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I look forward to you report Owain. Regarding your ‘long-tailed u’, my first learning Welsh book, purchased around 1978, and whose name I forget, had a character that matches your description which was used to denote one of the pronunciations of ‘y’. The delta character might be the Greek d?
Please, take it from me, never ever ever try and research old Welsh orthography in the early hours of the morning after a night in the pub.
It’s just not worth it.
(Nice night though. Won the quiz, and decent Welsh conversations though outnumbered by monoglots, so that’s a winner itself!)
Anyhow, for what it is worth, here is a transcription of the “peniarth 20” manuscript, the “chronicles of the princes”, showing a d with a cross in its “tail” to mark “dd” rather than “d”.
http://www.rhyddiaithganoloesol.caerdydd.ac.uk/en/ms-page.php?ms=Pen20&page=65
This is a photographic reproduction of the page from the national library of Wales website, showing a distinct letter used, but not as far as I can see particularly like a “d” with a cross in its tail.
http://digidol.llgc.org.uk/METS/BYT00001/frames?div=81&subdiv=0&locale=en&mode=reference
Probably my memory from when I was reading transcripts gave me the “delta” thing, but it nevertheless shows a distinct, joined firm being used.
Anyhow, llike I say, this was not something used by everyone, or even commonly, as far as I can see, but it seems to have been an option!
I think the one for “ch” was even less used, so am not going to carry on searching for it at this time of night…
Anyhow, seems that the use of such letters, though an option, were no where near as common as my memory told me, so glad I looked into it!
Oh, I know what you mean there! A sort of upside down “h”?
The letter in the mediaeval manuscript was more similar to a number “6”, if you see what I mean.
Here is the transcript of the beginning of the mabinogion from the White Book of Rhydderch, showing the “6” in the word “argl6ydd” in the first line
http://www.rhyddiaithganoloesol.caerdydd.ac.uk/en/ms-page.php?ms=Pen4&page=1r
And here is the photo of the page
http://digidol.llgc.org.uk/METS/RHY00001/physical?div=15&subdiv=0&locale=en&mode=reference
Again, rather less striking than the transcripts I think my memory was working from!
O wow, thanks Owain. The ð (‘dd’) is the same as the Icelandic ‘eth’, and pronounced the same way, makes sense to use that one. Oddly, the ‘thorn’ þ is not used for ‘th’ in the documents you link to - although it was used in Old and Middle English, ‘ye olde shoppe’ that you see sometimes is really ‘þe olde shoppe’. The equivalent letter in the manuscript looks to me like a ‘thorn’ with an additional curl at the top right, perhaps an attempt to link the voiced and the voiceless dental fricatives?
I found this interesting (?) reference in A Welsh Grammar, Historical and Comparative by John Morris Jones: “Lhuyd, (1707). used χ for ch, λ for ll, and ꝺ for dd” http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/A_Welsh_Grammar,_Historical_and_Comparative/Phonology - there seems to have been a real push to keep the number of Welsh letters to 24 by some scholars, and attempts by others to make an alphabet to reflect the sounds of the language.
The ỽ you mention I have never seen before, and is apparently a Middle Welsh letter: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ỽ Cool!
BTW, the book I mentioned earlier is “Living Welsh” by T. J. Rhys Jones, Hodder and Stoughton, 1978 (2nd impression). The up-side down h ‘ɥ’ is used by him to denote the dyn (‘ee’) and bryn (‘i’) pronunciations of ‘y’, as opposed to the dynion pronunciations (unstressed vowel schwa ‘ə’). The author says he does it to help the learner, but it didn’t help me much at the time The IPA describes this letter as a ‘voiced labial-palatal approximant’
Good to hear you had a great time in the pub. I am rather jealous, I rarely find Welsh speakers in a pub, I need to try harder.
One of Stereolab’s more obscure albums.
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I’m sure their lyrics are great